On James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
Whatever fear strikes any reader of Baldwin’s book awaits right in that opening paragraph: an unseemly portrait of faith. It is not literary sex, or violence, or the conflation… More
Animal Farm: Banned by the Soviets, Promoted by the CIA
Though the book cannot and should not be divorced from the Russian Revolution, Orwell sees beyond the specifics of that revolution, and even beyond revolution itself, to tell what… More
Why We Need Diverse LGBTQI Books
LGBTQI literature, while no longer taboo, still rests on uneasy ground in our school libraries. The tragedy, of course, is that young people are the ones who need these… More
Reservation Sunsets and ‘Salem’s Lot
Maybe the banning advocate truly is the 13 year old, terrified that his secret life is out, that some novelist had looked into his private world and reported from… More
On Beauty: Banning Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The narrative that Pecola absorbs from the world around her is simple. It tells her that to be beautiful is to be white. It shapes her identity at the… More
National Coalition Against Censorship Announces Winners of Cameron Post Essay Contest
The contest, co-sponsored by PEN and other free expression groups, invited high school students in Delaware to write a 250-500 word essay saying what they felt school board members… More
BANNED: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’
The Cape Henlopen, DE, school board took emily m. danforth's critically acclaimed novel 'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' off the summer reading list for containing a word that rhymes… More
PEN Members Reading at Paradise Banned Event
On Monday, September 30, PEN partnered with the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression for readings in celebration of PEN's Banned Book Month. Reading the poets whose work have been… More
Tyranny of Parents: Banning Shel Silverstein
Warning: What you are about to read contains profanity, vile, morbid, and anti-parent material, suggestive illustrations, subliminal messages that glorify Satan, suicide, cannibalism, disrespect for truth and legitimate authority,… More
Song of Songs
Why is Song of Songs singled out as the problem child? Song of Songs, the Bible's great love poem, is the zenith of the Bible's contemporary social incomprehensibility because… More
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